Sherri Shepherd Wants You to Live

Sherri Shepherd cares about Black people. “The View” co-host and comedienne doesn’t want to see diabetes, which affects Blacks and Hispanics in disproportionate numbers, become your reality. So she’s penned a new book “Plan D: How to Lose Weight and Beat Diabetes (Even If You Don’t Have It).” She says that after being diagnosed with diabetes herself in 2007.

“I wrote the book because I was diagnosed with diabetes a couple of weeks before I started “The View,” she told the Tom Joyner Morning Show. “When I started “The View,” I was 197 pounds. I had the vision of [her son] Jeffrey being here without me to raise him and I thought I gotta change my life.

My mom passed away at 41 from complications of diabetes. And I said I cannot not be here and leave my son. You know, I had a divorce because of an extramarital affair, and I’ll be damned if another woman is raising my child. I just had to change my life, my eating, exercise look at food a different way and lost weight.”

While she says sweets and taffy apples in particular were her weakness, she’s learned to curb those impulses to continue leading a healthy life.

“I like sweets. I love taffy apples. But you have to find alternatives. I do apples, organic peanut butter and walnuts that’s my sweet. The food that I love I send to other people. They can eat it. I live vicariously through everybody else.”

Shepherd lost 40 pounds in over a year. Although she put back on 10, she says she keeps the weight down with eating habits and exercising regularly by going to boot camp and spinning.